Best of London Design Festival 2018

This September, London Design Festival celebrated and promoted London as the design capital of the world and the gateway of creativity to the rest of the planet.

With a slew of launches, events, and installations that took place across the city, London came to life in a celebration of creativity and inspiration. Nearly every pocket of the city took part with a mix of pop-ups and programmes everywhere from the V&A to Clerkenwell, making for a dizzying amount of design to take in!

Here we share some of the highlights from this past week at the London Design Festival!

Please Feed The Lions is an interactive installation in Trafalgar Square by Es Devlin, known for her innovative projection-mapped sculptures that fuse light, music & tech. The project follows a year-long collaboration between Es Devlin and Google Arts & Culture. Exploring the parameters of design and artificial intelligence, the installation incorporates a deep learning algorithm developed by Ross Goodwin, creative technologist at Google. Following the Festival, the sculpture will be digitised as part of an online exhibition on Google Arts & Culture so people all over the world can experience the groundbreaking artwork.

Waugh Thistleton Architects and Arup have collaborated with the American Hardwood Export Council to create MultiPly, an interactive modular maze-like installation in The Sackler Courtyard at the V&A. The pavilion confronts two of the age’s biggest challenges – the need for housing and the urgency to fight climate change – and presents the fusion of modular systems and sustainable construction materials as a possible solution.

Celebrating the opening of their new headquarters in the design district of Fitzrovia, @WonderGlassltd has invited design duo Raw-Edges to curate their first installation. The gallery is showcasing classic and new collections as well as samples showcasing the capabilities of their WonderLab artisans. The design of the space by architect Massimo De Conti is inspired by the inner soul of Fitzrovia.

alphabet_by_kellenberger_white_photography_by_leemawdsley

Scholten & Baijings invited visitors to immerse themselves in a daily tea ritual, on the first floor of the historic Fortnum & Mason store in Piccadilly. Using more than 80 products, designed by companies from across the globe, the installation delivers a unique take on the ritual of tea, set across a series of tables.

Supported by Fortnum & Mason.

Composer Arvo Pärt and Arup present “Memory & Light”, curated by Clare Farrow. This installation was specially conceived for the V&A’s Norfolk House Music Room and was inspired by Arvo Pärt’s famous words: “I could compare my music to white light, which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.”

Danish fashion designer Henrik Vibskov created ‘The Onion Farm’ in Room 94 of the V&A’s Tapestry Galleries. The dimmed lighting in the Tapestry Galleries inspired the idea of growing something in the dark, as if underground. The Onion Farm is a light, dynamic structure, that spins along the gallery. Industrial, colourful brushes and red textile ‘onions’ are seemingly hanging and growing from the structure.

London Design Festival has collaborated with 1418 NOW on a commissioned project inspired by the First World War concept of Dazzle. Pentagram’s approach was to re-interpret the construction of Dazzle camouflage from a purely graphic origin into a typographic exploration. Using the Wilfrid Wilson Gibson poem “Suspense” as its source, Pentagram’s design abstracts the letterforms and words into an immersive experience by placing the visitor inside the Dazzle room.

Dazzle is part of the Dazzle Ship series co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW and Liverpool Biennial.

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SA Décor and Design is a media house specialising in the publication of an annually released hardcover sourcing guide for the Décor and Design industry, as well as a content rich website and blog which work in tandem to support our diverse selection of advertisers. Our platforms have been thoroughly utilised in the South African market and abroad for the past nineteen years.